The expansive career of photographer Stephen Shore, which began at an early age and was cast in good luck and youthful hubris from the start, is laid out in great detail across the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art until May of next year. This retrospective exhibition contains over 500 photographs, archival books and material, and a row of ipads displaying the artist’s well-maintained instagram feed. Shore’s practice is the ultimate in straight photography. Especially important for its early adopter status to the application of color in photography, his stark, straightforward oeuvre provides window after window into the experiences of the artist as he explores the United States, from New York City as a teen to the spread of the MidWest as an adult.

Image Courtesy of MoMA

Spanning five decades of work, the show opens with Shore’s candid and not-so-candid captures of the fashionable denizens of Andy Warhol’s factory. Portraits of attractive peers standing before their own harsh shadows mix with late night snaps of Warhol and cohorts out to eat in Chinatown. Timeworn and trite as it is has become to see this particular set of cool people still looking and being cool, the documentation of The Factory undeniably does its part in casting the mythic artist role that Warhol intentionally embodied, and therefore holds a special place in art history, if for no other reason that that. This section sets the tone for the rest of the show, signaling us to keep in mind as we meander past each frame that, despite the current ubiquity of his style, Shore was once on the cutting edge of culture, and a pioneer of common practices in his field.

Image Courtesy of MoMA

Of the overwhelming volume of quotidian moments perforating the gallery walls, what follows is a small selection of high-tension compositions that rang out about the rest. Untitled, 1975, is an image divided into sections defined by nature’s tactility: the lower third is a grassy Midwestern field sliced through by an asphalt highway road, cut off from view upon meeting the edges of an encroaching smoke cloud, billowing on the horizon. His 1973 picture, Mr. Shore’s Breakfast, Trail’s End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973, yet another striking snapshot of his traipses through Bible belt America, presents a still-life breakfast scene of pancakes and a pitted cantaloupe. Gazing thoughtfully at this meal, you can’t help but smile, tongue-in-cheek, at the nascency of food photography before it was a hashtag.

Image Courtesy of MoMA

U. S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, July 21, 1973, 1973, is a picture of a roadside billboard and surrounding fields unfolding into distant mountains, but more importantly, it is a juxtaposition of two natural scenes: the billboard’s lush mountain lake, and the actual landscape: arid, sprawling, and overgrown. Digital natives might relate the familiar “image within-an-image” effect to basic jpg layering and may share an aesthetic impulse I’m reminded of when working with editing software. When copying or dragging an image from the internet and pasting it into another image, there is a moment – before beginning the process of scaling and otherwise adjusting the new image – a moment of temptation to simply leave it alone. To let it remain dead center, enclosed by the now-more-lively periphery of the image that sits behind. It is shocking how novel and delighting it can still be to find that the composition you’ve created by a slight or default action is beautiful or dynamic or suddenly open to meaningful interpretations. I wonder if this is like the feeling Stephen Shore had when he took this photo in 1973.

Image Courtesy of MoMA

To that theme, Shore and curator Quentin Bajac have, in a sense, “dragged and dropped” five wanderlusty decades of passing snapshots onto the walls of the MoMA – sans lighting, cropping, tweaking. True to his overarching method, the exhibition makes no judgements, and the pictures are generally light in meaning and conceptual depth, instead focusing on dimension, shape, light. His priorities are the formal qualities of a world that he continues to rigorously refresh with each city, each capture, each click.

]]>Megan Vun Wong: Vicissitudehttp://arterynyc.com/2017/12/02/megan-vun-wong-vicissitude/
Sat, 02 Dec 2017 23:07:50 +0000http://arterynyc.com/?p=2153Viewing Megan Vun Wong’s work in order to identify its various notations and marks, an attempt to “read” it for it’s near associational messages might be time well spent for some people. And yet it would be far more pleasurable and satisfying to see each work as a living entity outside of the realm of guessing games. The heartfelt ambiguity which is at the core of each painting is part of the conceptual attitude that infuses the artist’s overall project Vicissitude. Here the known and the unknown co-exist as does the unseen with the seen, the visible and the invisible, the discernible with the evanescent. It is especially felt in the artist’s layered plexiglass constructions. Her regulatory aesthetic impulse is to sensitively intuit where she wants to go without any prearrangement. This laissez-faire aesthetic drive allows her to interact with her materials and to see what they can actually do instead of making them do anything. Fundamentally, the mysteriousness aspect of each work is the psychic residue left between the ineffable distance of conscious reality and unconscious processes in Megan Vun Wong’s painterly applications. This is the gift which this artist so provocatively brought to the public in her recent New York exhibition at Artifact and it stems from a rare discernment and the capacity to see beyond sight’s everyday parameters.

— Stephen Glass

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Wed, 29 Nov 2017 23:36:38 +0000http://arterynyc.com/?p=2144The Art Newspaper – The South African photographer and activist Zanele Muholi is to be presented with France’s premier cultural award, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, at a ceremony in Pretoria today. – read more
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Wed, 29 Nov 2017 23:29:22 +0000http://arterynyc.com/?p=2141Artsy – “Sit as little as possible.” The advice, offered by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche over a century ago, sounds like it could have been cribbed from the Health section of the New York Times. He continues: “Do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement—in which the muscles do not also revel.” – read more
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Wed, 29 Nov 2017 19:30:46 +0000http://arterynyc.com/?p=2138Hyperallergic – A mahaffa, I learn, is a handheld fan made by weaving the fronds of palm trees, a ubiquitous household item that is emblematic of Iraq and the Gulf region. It is also one of the few belongings that Hayv Kahraman’s family took with them as they fled to Sweden from Iraq, during the first Gulf War. –read more
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Wed, 29 Nov 2017 18:54:56 +0000http://arterynyc.com/?p=2135The Art Newspaper – Art Basel and its Swiss parent company, MCH group, have settled their legal case against Adidas over the limited edition trainers that the German sportswear giant designed using the art fair’s trademark. The shoes were distributed for free during Art Basel Miami Beach last year. – read more
]]>David Hockney’s Life in Painting: Spare, Exuberant, Fullhttp://arterynyc.com/2017/11/29/david-hockneys-life-in-painting-spare-exuberant-full/
Wed, 29 Nov 2017 18:40:30 +0000http://arterynyc.com/?p=2132The New York Times – Give it up for David Hockney, one of painting’s elder statesmen, and for his crystalline retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which proceeds in a string of perfectly curated mini-exhibitions. Check at the door the usual caveats and tsk-tsks regarding this wildly popular Anglo-Californian — that he’s a lightweight; that his “moment” was the ’60s; that he’s obvious. Suspend at least briefly the belief that a tragic vision, or abstraction, is essential for entry into art history’s pantheon. – read more
]]>Josephine Halvorson at Sikkema Jenkinshttp://arterynyc.com/2017/11/29/josephine-halvorson-at-sikkema-jenkins/
Wed, 29 Nov 2017 18:03:08 +0000http://arterynyc.com/?p=2120by Sara Blazej

Artery Exclusive

Josephine Halvorson presents a new series of paintings and works on paper in her fourth solo show at Sikkema Jenkins in Chelsea. These paintings, oil on linen, are closely cropped scenes of industrial remnants present in the natural area surrounding her home in Brewster, a suburb in Western Massachussetts. Halvorson has taken, as a lyrical framework, the following lost Woody Guthrie verse, apparently omitted from the great anthemic American classic “This Land is Your Land”:As I went walking I saw a sign there / And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.” / But on the other side it didn’t say nothing, / That side was made for you and me.

Posted, oil on linen, 25″ x 17″

The populist message of these lyrics coats the show with a lacquer of righteous intention, energizing its content with a jolt of social justice. Halvorson, by attaching these lyrics to her work, seems now to be subtly yet explicitly advocating for a socialist future without private property. One in which the “No Trespassing” signs she lushly renders are merely the traces of a failed social order premised on ownership. But at the same time, the paintings are very likeable on their own, as eerie and expertly produced stand-alone objects.

There is indeed an enticing ghostly quality to the synthetic ruins she finds among the wild of her backyard. Most powerful are her renderings of signs nailed to tree trunks, as in Jagged, Posed and Pale Posted, all 2017. Man-made notices that once screamed from the top of the forrest’s visual hierarchy to halt potential intruders with their bright hue, now are faded and cracked, their aggression quieted by time. Territory markings by humans and animals alike find their place in the story of the local landscape, observed and captured by the artist on walks.

Whether the boundary signs refer to current property lines is unclear, and it is somehow fun to wonder about. One might imagine an scruffy old libertarian thirty or forty years ago, traipsing through the woodlands with his hammer and nails to delineate, with some level of pride and ancestral solidarity, his own private landmass. Then, by contrast, we are drawn into an empathy with the natural elements themselves. In Callus, 2017, we see a tree trunk that has experienced a wound and undergone self-healing, resulting in the namesake of the piece, a callus. It’s a simple, maybe even simplistic, way of reminding us of the damage we do by enforcing claims on the natural world.

Fallen Fence Post, 2017, oil on linen, 17″ x 26″

In the end, Halvorson weaves a surprisingly entrancing pictorial narrative about the relationship between society and land in the United States, focusing on her own locality – working outward from where she stands. Her perspective, though broad and attempting to encompass national issues, remains importantly centered within her town and her practice, which allows her to zoom in and out contextually, while remaining anchored in her own subjectivity.

]]>U.N. considers “killer robot regulation” to prevent Terminator robots from exterminating humankindhttp://arterynyc.com/2017/11/29/u-n-considers-killer-robot-regulation-to-prevent-terminator-robots-from-exterminating-humankind/
Wed, 29 Nov 2017 05:51:01 +0000http://arterynyc.com/?p=2117Natural News – A U.N. panel, recognizing that the development of AI technologies is now moving at breakneck speed, recently advisedthat international regulations be established to limit the types of weaponry and techniques that “killer robots” can use to target human beings. – read more

]]>The Quiet Radicalism and Dry Humor of Early Gilbert & Georgehttp://arterynyc.com/2017/11/29/the-quiet-radicalism-and-dry-humor-of-early-gilbert-george/
Wed, 29 Nov 2017 05:35:59 +0000http://arterynyc.com/?p=2111Hyperallergic – The duo’s early work reveals how they opened the door to truly seeing queer bodies in art. –